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The southern reaches of Colombia’s Putumayo department experienced intense levels of violence between 1999 and 2006, when paramilitaries from the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) occupied virtually every municipal subdivision. Situated at the crosshairs of the war against guerrilla forces and the “war on drugs,” civilians employed a variety of strategies to survive, subvert and resist paramilitary violence. One tactic was a literary magazine called Katharsis: Revista literaria del Putumayo. This paper places Katharsis in the context of other library-based initiatives to analyze how literary practices—the embodied, social acts of reading and writing—have promoted cultures of peace in the Western Colombian Amazon. Drawing on insights from anthropology and social theory, I argue that Katharsis’ designation as a literary project allowed it to pass unnoticed by armed actors, thus exemplefing what James Scott calls an “infrapolitics” of resistance to the armed conflict. Despite the magazine’s “literary” label, however, Katharsis writings have appeared as testimonial evidence in reports on paramilitary abuses commissioned by the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica and frequently critique other forms of injustice affecting the region. Its pages thus constitute a counter-archive of the Putumayo, re-writing the armed conflict—and the hegemonic discourses that have long stigmatized the region in the national imaginary—from a local perspective. I further propose that the imbrication of embodied and archival practices underlying Katharsis complicates the distinction between archive and repertoire elaborated by Diana Taylor. The “literary magazine of the Putumayo” allows us to consider the multi-dimensional role of literature in the Colombian post-conflict.